Deleting files from Lightroom

[Rachaelkaustin]

HI,

I would like to 'clean out' my Lightroom library. Is there anyway to do this as a whole rather than one folder at a time? It's taking forever to do them one at a time. Will doing this help my Lightroom's performance?

Thanks!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi Rachael, welcome to the forum!

Is there any particular reason you want to remove everything from your catalog?

If you're wanting to remove everything, you're probably better off just going to File > New Catalog and starting a clean catalog. Leave the old one in place for now, just in case you want to go back to it.

But I'd still have to ask why!

 

[Rachaelkaustin]

Hi Victoria

Thanks for getting back to me! Yes, it probably does seem odd that I want to delete them all and maybe there are some good reasons I should leave them. I was hoping that deleting most or all of them would improve the performance of my lightroom.

I am a wedding photographer and I edit close to 7o+ weddings a year and they are all shot in RAW. So, I have backup copies of all the RAW files on disc and the jpegs have all been exported and everything archived. So, in the case that I do need the RAW files again, and that looks to be rare, then I could just reload those images when needed.

My lightroom is sluggish and slow. I think it must be the amount of folders I have piled up in the library. This is Lightroom 1.2.

Any thoughts? Thanks again!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Ah, ok, I'm with you. I work primarily with wedding photographers worldwide, so I do understand that problem! If you do decide to strip out your catalog, I'd seriously consider leaving that catalog tucked away on a backup disc and start a fresh catalog to work on.

And before you do anything else, update to LR 1.4.1, which was the last 1.x update. There were pretty major improvements between the 1.x releases.

If you want to give us a bit more information about your system specs and where the files are stored, we may be able to offer a few more suggestions too.

 

[Kiwigeoff]

Hi Rachael and welcome aboard!! Victoria is the best at your line for sure!!
To help us help you could you please take a moment to fill in your signature in the "userCP' that is found in the nav-bar at the top left of the page - thanks.

May I add that you may want to seriously look at investing in LR2 and then upgrading to 2.3 (free) as are significant changes to the catalog structure between 1 and 2 which improved performance immensely _ I have a low end system and have no issues running reasonable size catalogs now whereas LR1 was for me limited to 1'k files per catalog before performance was unusable.
You can d/l the trial of LR2 and run a test catalog to see.

 

[Rachaelkaustin]

I will gladly accept any advice about wedding photography & Lightroom!

I just made a back-up of the current catalog and updated to Lightroom 1.4. I then made a new catalog.

My specs are:

iMac24/2.8/2x1G/32'/SD/M/K
The RAW files are imported onto external hard drives and stored there. We don't store weddings on the Mac hard drive. The Jpegs are exported from Lightroom to a sub-folder with the RAW files.

Any thoughts on where to go from here? Thanks again for your help Victoria!

 

[Rachaelkaustin]

Hi Geoff,

Thanks for your advice as well! I will have a look at adding my specs to my signature. That will take some doing as I am VERY DENSE about such things! My hubby is our IT dept. and I will have to nail him down to give me details. I was able to locate the invoice for our Mac as iMac24/2.8/2x1G/32'/SD/M/K
Frankly, I am not sure what those numbers mean!
I do shoot Nikon however! ;^) Thanks again for your advice. I will look into upgrading L/R to 2 and then 2.3. As many images as we process, we should really be using the best possible.

 

[Denis Pagé]

I just made a back-up of the current catalog and updated to Lightroom 1.4.

Go to menu Help, About... and check that it is in fact Lightroom 1.4.1 as 1.4 was flawed! Note that it will still display 1.4 in the upper left corner of the screen. But I guess they do not offer 1.4 anymore on their website... :roll: